About Badges

About Open Hub Badges

Badges are a means to recognize the myriad ways Open Hub members contribute to Open Source. Open Hub awards two types of badges: a leveled badge or a boolean badge. The leveled badge has different levels that may be awarded based upon the number of events used to evaluate the badge. Levels are indicated by the number of orange pips below the badge. Pips are Base2 numbers. The boolean badge is given when an account holder has achieved a certain state. Either that state has been achieved or it has not been achieved; hence the boolean type. Boolean badges have no pips below them.

We hope that awarding Badges encourages Open Hub members to contribute to Open Source and to maintaining Open Hub. We understand that there is a risk that some folks will try to grab badge awards by making spurious edits to Open Hub and we hope the Open Hub community will be on the look out for those few who fail to grasp the intent of an open community-based platform such as Open Hub.

Types of Badge

Open Hub currently awards the following badges:

Describer

The Describer badge is a leveled badge that is given to an Open Hub member who edits project descriptions. Level 1 is given when one project description has been edited. Level 2 is given for edits to four project descriptions. Level 3 is for 10 edits and levels 4, 5, and 6 are for 20, 50 and 100 edits respectively. There are opportunities to earn even more levels beyond a Level 6 Describer!

Repo Man/Woman

The Repo Man or Repo Woman badge is a leveled badge that is given to an Open Hub member who edits project repository information. Level 1 is given when one project repository has been edited. Level 2 is given for edits to 5 project repositories. Level 3 is for 15 edits and levels 4, 5, and 6 are for 35, 70 and 110 edits respectively. There are opportunities to earn even higher levels beyond Level 6.

The Big Cheese

The Big Cheese badge is a boolean badge given to an Open Hub member who has claimed management of at least one project on Open Hub.

Stacker

The Stacker badge is a leveled badge given to an Open Hub member who creates Project Stacks. There are only 5 available levels and they are awarded for the first five project stacks created.

Org Man

The Org Man badge is a boolean badge given to an Open Hub member who is managing at least one organization on Open Hub.

FOSSer

The FOSSer badge is a leveled badge given to an Open Hub member who contributes to Free and Open Source Software projects. The level 1 badge is awarded when an Open Hub member contributes to one FOSS project. Level 2 is given for contributions to 3 projects. Levels 3, 4, and 5 are given for contributions to 6, 10 and 20 projects respectively. Additional opportunities exist to earn even higher levels!

Taxonomist

The Taxonomist badge is a leveled badge given to an Open Hub member who edits project tags and taxonomies. The level 1 badge is awarded when an Open Hub member makes one edit to project tags. Level 2 is given for edits to the tags for four different projects. Levels 3, 4, and 5 are given for contributions to 15, 25, and 55 different projects while Level 6 is given for tag edits to 100 different projects on Open Hub. And, additional opportunities to earn even higher levels are available.

Kudo

The Kudo badge has been redesigned to fit in with the rest of our badges and we will display Kudos in two different forms. When shown with other badges, the Kudos badge shows the Kudo

Rank through the use of the pips. When shown elsewhere on Open Hub, the Kudo Rank is shown with the numerical rank within the laurel leaves. However, both displays show the same information: the Kudo Rank.

About Pips

Obviously, we want to be able to award different levels for increasing levels of contribution, both to Open Source and to Open Hub. We started brainstorming and sketching all sorts of ways to show levels. At one point, when we talked about the need to be able to show higher levels of awards if that became necessary in the future, Marketing made a note that we needed “infinite scalability”. We helped them reduce that requirement, ah, significantly. After all, infinity is really big. Really. Big.

At one point, our Product Manager began to chuckle and said, what if we used binary to show the levels? It was a smash suggestion and we all were hooked. So ladies and gentlemen, we present the leveling model for the Open Hub Badges: Pips.

Pips use Base 2 to show levels, with digits starting from the right, just as in Base 10. For the non-binary aware, to the right is a picture of the pips and the Base 10 (regular number) equivalent. One could receive up to Level 15 if any badge were to award such a level. And, we have enough flexibility to add another pip to the left and be able to show 31 different levels. So. Very. Cool.